The waning lightning flared up, obligingly showing Derron his road running straight for some distance ahead, with the dim brooding cathedral at last visible to him on its faroff hill. Much nearer, the lightning also showed him a shiny object lying in the center of the road, lying atop what seemed to be a line scratched or dug perpendicularly across the way.
“Stand by, Operations.” Derron made his way cautiously up to the wet, soft thing, prodded it with a toe and waited for the lightning, which came again to show him Amling’s naked body. “Never mind looking in the blur for Amling’s lifeline. I guess he came down outside the safety zone too.”
He knelt briefly over the body, gripping his weapons staff while his eyes searched the rainy night as best they could, and described the situation. The line had been scratched at precise depth across the road by some tool or cybernetic limb that sliced stone like cheese; quite likely the same implement that had removed the back of Amling’s head. “Maybe it marked the boundary line of violence for us; just to let us know that it’s aware of it.”
Derron did not dawdle there. For a time he walked backward toward Oibbog, staff ready, trying to probe with eyes and ears the rainy night as he retreated from it. Not that his senses, or his reactions, were likely to be good enough if the enemy was there.
But he was spared. The berserker had killed in passing, where it could do so safely, and then had gone on about its real business.
V
By the time Derron reached the place where the road bent sharply to the left toward the wash-out bridge, the lightning had gone on over the horizon, so he felt rather than saw the bulk of the hill and oathedral ahead of him and above. But close by the side of the road he could now make out the monastery wall, the broken gate and, just inside the gateway, Vincento’s coach deserted in the puddles. From the shelter of a cloister came the gentle mumbling and grunting of loadbeasts. Derron paused only a moment before plodding through the gate and across the soggy earth to the entrance of the main building.
He made no effort to be quiet, and the dark entrance promptly emitted a challenge: “Who’s there? Stand and give our name!”
The dialect was one Derron had expected. He stopped, and as the beam of a lantern flicked out at him, he answered: “I am Valzay of Mosnar, mathematicus and scholar. From the coach and animals I see here, I judge that you within are honest men. And I have need of shelter.”
A door creaked, and behind the door the lantern retreated. “Step for’ard, then.”
Derron advanced slowly. When he had gotten in out of the rain he found himself in what had been the common room of the monastery, facing a pair of soldiers. One of these was armed with a crude pistol and the other with a short sword; judging by their uniforms, they were from a mercenary company.
When they could see his gentleman’s clothes more plainly, their manner became more or less respectful. “Well, sir, how d’you come to be a-wandering afoot and alone?”
He told how his skittish loadbeast, scared by lightning, had run off with his light sulky. A plague on the animal! If he could catch it in the morning, he’d have some of its hide off! With whip-cracking vehemence he shook water from his hat.
Derron had an effortless feel for acting when there was a need. The soldiers chuckled, relaxed most of their vigilance, became willing to chat. There was certainly plenty of room here for another boarder—the proprietary monks had left long ago. The place was no tavern with girls and ale; even firewood was in short supply, but the roof did keep the rain off. Yes, they were from a mercenary company, one now in the pay of the Holy Temple. Their captain with the bulk of his men was in Oibbog, which was just across the river.
They still harbored some suspicion of Derron—he might conceivably be a scout for some well organized band of brigands—so they did not. tell him how many soldiers had been caught on this side of the torrent when the bridge collapsed. He did not ask, of course, but he gathered that there were not very many.
“And if the cap’n can’t do more’n wave to us for the next couple days, why that’s all right with us, hey what?”
“Naw, no one else but the old gentleman as owns the coach and his servant an’ his driver. And a pair of friars. Plenty empty cells, sir, so take your pick. One’s about as damp as the next.”
Derron murmured his thanks and, with some brief help from the lantern, groped his way down a passage and into a vacant cell, doorless now like all the others. Built against the rear wall was a wooden bunk frame that had not yet been ripped out for firewood, and on that he sat down. The rush of events had left him a little numb; he still could not quite grasp that Vincent Vincento was here somewhere within a few meters of him, might even be the author of the snore that echoed faintly down the passage.
Derron streached out on the wooden frame, knapsack under his head; genuinely fired, he found himself dozing toward sleep. His thoughts as consciousness dulled were filled not with Vincento or time travel or even berserkers, but simply with the sound of fading rain and the freshness of the infinite dean atmosphere around him. It was the theme of resurrection . . .
He had been asleep for a few minutes when Operations put a throbbing behind his right ear. He came wide awake at once and tucked his carven wedge-symbol closer under his chin.
“Odegard, you’re in the monastery all right?”
“Affirmative.”
“Good. Now we’re getting our screens tuned in. There are fourteen lifelines in or near that monastery-temple complex, counting your own. One of course is Vincento’s. One seems to be an unborn child’s, you know how they show on a screen in dots and dashes.”
Derron mused subvocally. “Let’s see. Me, Vincento, his two servants, and the two soldiers I’ve seen. That makes six. And they said there were two friars. Eight, which would leave six more unaccounted for. Probably four more soldiers and a campfollower who’s picked up something she won’t want to carry—though that one soldier did say something about there being no girls. Anyway, I suppose your idea is there may be some apparent person here who has no lifeline showing on your screens—our hypothetical berserker-android.”
“That’s precisely our idea, yes.”
“Tomorrow I can count noses and we’ll see . . . wait.”
At the entrance of Derron’s cell a shape of lesser blackness became discrete and moved. The figure of a hooded friar, utterly faceless in the gloom, came a halfstep inside before halting abruptly and muttered a few indistinguishable words that might have been an apology for entering the wrong cell. The figure then withdrew as silently it had come.
Derron was gripping his staff, pointing it at the doorway. “Just had a short visit from someone. Or maybe from something. Maybe that’s where Amling’s robe went.”
Hours passed before Derron dozed again.
When Vincento was awakened in darkness to find himself bedded amid damp straw, with bare stone walls close about him, he knew a moment of sinking terror. The worst had already happened, and he lay in the Defender’s dungeon. The terror was deepened when he saw the monk-hooded figure bending over him. He could see in the moonlight which filtered now through the tiny window. Evidently the rain was over—
The rain—of course, he was still on his way to the Holy City for his trial!
The intensity of his relief was such that Vincento accepted his being awakened almost with courtesy. “What is it?” he gasped, sitting up on his shelf of a bed, pulling his traveling-rug closer about his shoulders. His manservant Will slept on a bundled mound on the dark floor.
The visitor’s hooded face could not be seen; the visitor’s voice was a sepulchral whisper: “Messire Vincento, come alone to the cathedral tomorrow. At the crossways of nave and transepts you will receive good news, from your friends in high places.”
Could Nabur or Belam be sending him some secret word? Or, more likely, was this some Defenders’s trickery? A man summoned to trial was not supposed to discuss the matter with anyone.
“It will be good news, Messire Vincento. Come
alone and be willing to wait if you are not met at once. And do not seek to know my name or face.”
Vincento held his silence; he would commit himself to nothing. But the visitor, satisfied that the message had been heard, melted away into the night.
When Vincento awakened again, it was from a pleasant dream. He had been back on the estate provided for him by the Senate of his city, safe in his own bed, with his mistress’s warm body solid and comforting beside him. In reality the woman had been gone for some time—women no longer meant very much—but the estate was still there. If only they would let him return to it in peace!
He had been awakened this time by the touch on his face of a shaft of morning sunlight, which came striking into his cell from the high thin window of the opposite cell across the corridor. As he lay recalling with curiosity his strange midnight visitor, the sun-shaft was slowly moving away from his face. That motion made it instantly, for him, a golden pendulum of subtle torture.
He faced also the pendulum of choice. His mind could swing one way, tick, and meet in foresight the shame of swallowed truth and pride, the humiliation of an enforced recanting. And the other way, tock, there would be the breaking agony of the boot or the rack, or slower destruction in a buried cell.
Oh, of course, the crude physical torture was a remote threat only. He would have to be very obstinate and outspoken before the Defenders would go that far with him. But it was not impossible. They would say that a stubborn defendant forced them to employ such means.
So his pendulum of choice was not real; he had no real choice but to recant. Let the sun move as they want it to. Let it whirl round the globe in an insane yearly spiral, to please arrogant fools who thought they could read all the secrets of the universe in a few dusty pages of the Holy Writings.
Lying on his back, Vincento raised a hand veined with ropy vessels against the slow-swiveling torture-blade of the sun. But the sun would not be stopped in its motion by any man’s hand. It mocked him all the more, making bright translucent wax out of the oldness of his fingers.
On the floor, Will stirred sluggishly in his rug-cocoon. Vincento barked him awake and chased him out to rouse the coachman Rudd, who slept beside the beasts—Rudd to look at the river’s level, Will to start getting something together for breakfast.
Left alone, he began the slow humiliating process of getting his aging bones unlimbered and ready for what the day might bring. In recent years his health had been poor. But he was not sick now, only old. And yes, he was afraid.
By the time Will came to inform him that a fire and hot tea were ready in the monastery’s common room, Vincento was ready also.
With mild surprise he found a new arrival in the common room, a youngster who introduced himself as Valzay of the distant land of Mosnar. Valzay made, as he put it, a modest claim to scholarship. And for a wonder he was decently respectful—he looked at Vincento with genuine, if restrained, awe and murmured that even in his distant homeland Vincente’s discoveries were known and praised.
Vincento acknowledged all this with pleasant nods, sipping his morning tea, wondering if this Valzay was the bearer of the good news he was supposed to hear from someone in the cathedral. Anyway he was not going to rush up there at once; Rudd reported that the river was no longer rising, but still too high and dangerous at this point for anyone to think of fording it. One more day, maybe.
So Vincento took his time consuming tea and a little food, told Rudd to give the two friars something if they came round, then strolled leisurely out into the sunshine to warm his bones. If he came late to his trial, there were plenty of witnesses here to tell the reason. Let the Defenders inveigh against the river, if they liked. No doubt it would dry up for them. No doubt all of nature could be made to do their bidding if they but threatened it enough.
But he must begin to practice his humility. He called to Will to bring him his writing materials from the coach, and he went to sit alone in the sun outside the broken monastery gate, with one tumbled block of stone for a bench and another for a table.
It was really about time he started writing his statement of recantation for the trial. Of course, the accused was not supposed to know why he had been summoned—probably the Defenders’s first question would be whether he had any idea of what he was charged with. But in his case there could hardly be any doubt. It had been fifteen years since the warning, which Vincento had halfforgotten; but when the summons came, he realized he had made enemies among men who never forgot anything.
The first paper he pulled from his portable escritoire was the old letter from Defender Belam. Involuntarily Vincento’s eye went at once to the words: “. . . no proof of our globe’s motion exists, as I believe, since none has been shown to me.”
No proof. Vincento wiped at his forehead with a tremulous hand. Now, with mortal fear to enforce bleak clarity of thought, he could see that the arguments he had conjured up from tides and sunspots really proved nothing about the motion of sun and planets. The truth about those motions had come to him before he had ever thought of proving it—he had looked long through telescopes, he had thought long and deeply, his mind weighing the sun and grasping at stars and comets; and truth had come through some inward door, like—just like a revelation.
His enemies who cried him down were blind and stupid in their refusal, or their inability, to see. And yet he knew that those who were to sit as his judges were shrewd logicians, within their limitations. If only there were something firm that he could set simply and incontrovertibly before them . . . oh, what would he not give!
His mind ached, and his fists clenched, his very guts contracted at the thought. If he had one solid simple proof he would risk all, he would dare anything to confront and confound them with it, to rub their long arrogant noses in the very obvious truth!
But since there was nothing to support this mood of glorious defiance, it soon passed. The truth was he was old and afraid, and he would recant.
Slowly he got out pen and ink, and slowly he began his first draft. From time to time he paused, sitting in the sun with closed eyes, trying not to think.
VI
Derron counted seven soldiers round the breakfast fire and found each of them overjoyed to accept a swallow of brandy from his traveling flask and willing enough to talk. No, there was no one else in the monastery or cathedral or nearer than the town across the river. Not that they knew of.
When he was alone a few minutes later, Derron did some subvocal mumbling. “Operations? Count the lifelines here again. I make it thirteen of us. If you can make it twelve, then one of my smiling companions has clockwork for guts. But if you come out with fourteen again, then either there’s some bandit or deserter lurking in a corner or you’re misreading. I think you’re misreading that dotted line, anyway; I consider it unlikely that any of us here is pregnant, since we’re all men.” Operations was apologetic. “We’ll recheck right away; you know it’s not easy reading these things.” After finishing their morning meal and emptying Derron’s brandy flask, most of the soldiers settled down to serious loafing. Rudd, Vincento’s coachman, led his loadbeasts forth in search of grass. Following them through the gate, Derron located Vincento, sitting peacefully alone and apart. Well and good.
Remembering his mythical loadbeast and sulky, Derron put on an exasperated expression and strolled along the road toward the bridgestump, scanning the muddy fields on either side as if in search of his property.
At the bridge-stump were the two friars, gray cowls thrown back from their unremarkable heads. They seemed to be talking of ways in which the bridge might sometime be rebuilt. Derron knew that within a year or two, the river would be spanned here by new arches of stone. And those arches would still be standing solidly more than three hundred years later, when a young postgraduate history student would come on a hiking tour with the girl he loved, enthusiastic about seeing the town and cathedral of Oibbog . . . the river would look much different then, gentler of course and with more trees along its banks. Whi
le the stones of the road would still look much the same . . .
“May the Holy One give you a good day, esteemed sir!” It was the stouter of the friars whose voice broke in upon the start of reverie.
The interruption was welcome. “Good day to you also, reverend brothers, in His name. Does the river still rise?”
The thinner friar had a loving face. In hands all bone and tendon he held a chunk of masonry, as if he meant to start this minute to rebuild the bridge. “The river falls now, sir. How goes the path of your life, up or down?”
The falsehood about beast and buggy seemed dreary and unnecessary. “That can hardly be an easy question for any man to answer.” Seven or eight of the local peasantry had materialized out of mud and distance and were plodding their barefoot way along the drying bank of the torrent toward the bridgestump. One walking in front swung proudly in his hand a string of large and silvery fish, fresh enough to be still twitching and twisting.
A few paces away the peasants halted. Together they bowed rather perfunctorily in Derron’s direction; he was not dressed finely enough to overawe anyone, and plainly he was not the one they had come to see. The man with the fish began talking to the friars, and almost at once others interrupted him, all squabbling over who had the right to speak first and who the right of disposal of the fish. They had come to strike a bargain. Would the holy brothers accept one of these fine fish (“From me!” “From me, Holy Brother, it was my fishline!”) and in return say some potent prayers for the giver’s crops?
Derron turned away from what gave promise of becoming a nasty quarrel among the peasants to see that Vincento was still alone. And the full sunlit view of the Cathedral of Oibbog caught Derron unawares.
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